“I met a bird with strange eyes”: My adventures with Image Streaming

This is a “stream” I got a couple of months ago as I was doing Image Streaming before sleeping. It was much more interesting than usual and I copied the recording to another place on the phone to find it later, but I seem to have lost it. All this from memory, so none of the many details that accompany an ISR sessions, just the gist.

The question at the beginning was “Will I ever be able to live a life I am happy about?”

The vision

I was lying on my back in a really nice meadow. You know, the type of places one can have in memories of childhood, something almost Blake-like, but a bit darker and with higher contrast.

The meadow

It would have been a really nice meadow, but the sky was black, without a moon or without stars. The ground was emanating light from the inside (from bottom?), there was a really nice glow on everything.

I was lying on my back, trying to enjoy it all, but I just couldn’t. “I am in a meadow and people usually lie on their back and rest and feel happy, I should feel happy, I am supposed to enjoy this, why am I not enjoying this.” I couldn’t understand what was wrong. Then I tried to stand up but couldn’t, I was glued to the meadow. I kept trying to stand up, but the meadow held me tight. The gravity was very strong.

Then I felt knives “growing” from the ground. They were the size of pens, made out of an aluminium-like1TIL that both spellings are okay, aluminum and aluminium metal, and they went through my body, and I felt them disturbingly realistically. With them passing through arteries and blocking the flow of blood, which I felt flow in my stomach and through my tissues. I felt them in my mouth, through my eyes, it was absolutely horrible. (I assume in real life shock would have set in and I wouldn’t have to feel it all).

I still could not move, the knives were going through my body and bones, cracking them, it was horrible.

The Bird

Then I saw a bird, looking like an ostrich, about a third bigger in height than me. It was flying in my direction, and landed about 2m to my left, in my field of vision. It was gray, with long legs that looked like wood, and it looked pretty haggard. Not in a “I’ve flown though a thunderstorm on the way here” haggard, but more “I lived for two hundred years and this is how I am, and I’m old and wise enough not to care much about what you think about my looks, I don’t think about them at all, in fact”. Basically, the difference between dust that accumulated over the summer in an unused part of a country-house and dust that accumulated for millenia in an underground cave.

As cliche as it sounds, I felt it was older than time itself. I would write that it had something of the old wise owl in it, but it was also deeply inhuman. Not necessarily evil, but just impossible to understand. Not above human morals, not lacking human morals, but slightly to the left of human morals. Something cold, distant, rational, immensely old, immensely wise, and utterly incapable to be interested in anything. 2If it was clear that the bird was male or female, I would still have used it. On a scale from 0=male to 100=female it was purple, as the quote about writers’ life goes.

It wasn’t transcendentally old, scary and incomprehensible like the Lovecraftian Old Ones, a bit less transcendentally old, scary and incomprehensible than they. It wasn’t an emanation of some god, it actually lived in that body, and the body was completely material.

The most striking were its eyes. They were completely black and blank. Not “existing but black”, not “existing but too dark to see”, not “absent”, but it’s almost like they were an interrupt of the spacetime continuum. I’m not sure if it was looking at me or not. I’m not sure if it could see me. I’m not sure if it could see in a typical meaning of the term.

Suddenly I felt it invited me to ride it, the knives immediately retreated to the ground, my wounds instantly healed, and I found I could stand up. I climbed on its back and we flew. The feathers felt dirty and plastic, and its neck felt like wood. It carried me under the glowing ground. Everything around me looked kind of like a glitch in a videogame, when you fall under the textures.

We were flying lower and lower. It didn’t use the wings, it somehow slid through matter, and it was a very strange feeling. Imagine you are a point in a Cartesian coordinate system, and your coordinates are natural numbers, and then you start riding a function that belongs to the set of real numbers, you had no idea this was possible.

The Sphere

Lower and lower, and it was getting darker and darker, because there was no matter around us to reflect light, but a really strong light source shone below us. It was a white-blue energy sphere, and it had inside all the energy, all the matter in the world. It was the opposite of the empty eyes of the bird. The eyes had no matter and no place for matter, no place for emptiness, because emptiness still needs a place to exist, and the sphere had somehow more matter than matter itself. The closer we got, the more I felt it on my skin and inside my skin.

I felt/saw/understood that all geometry and matter in the world is connected to frames, wires, whatever you want to call them, they are the ones that hold them in place, like a net holding everything together, a net of meta-matter. And that sphere was the center of the coordinate system, where all the (radial) wires started. The sphere was holding them all together and was the source of energy the frames used to hold the matter. And the closer we got, the stronger was this energy field, almost meta-energy field, and the denser was the framework.

The bird also seemed to be also affected, it felt this energy as much as I did. I was happy that at least something connects us. Though the Bird is so strange and incomprehensible, we have some things in common.

We flew really close to the sphere, the sphere full of raw energy, of life, of vitality, of connectedness-between-matter, reality. The density of the matter itself was the same, it’s just that the matter itself (and my body, and the bird) were much more matter-like, more real than reality itself. (God, I sound like Haruki Murakami this entire post, but no other way to describe this.)

A current went through my body, and I saw the grid, I saw the relativity of space-time (only after touching it I understood that the sphere was controlling time the same way as it did matter), I touched Absolute Reality. I didn’t feel any other external reality, I didn’t feel that our reality was somehow “less important”, I didn’t see God or gods, I didn’t see any Lovecraftian timeless monsters, I knew that it was the deepest level that’s possible in this reality, and that this reality was probably the only one existing.

Even in regards to “this reality”, I didn’t “see everything”, everything that was or will be, didn’t feel enlightened, didn’t feel the suffering of all the creatures in the universe, or whatever cliches might apply. I maybe expected to feel OH WOW OH GOD NOW I UNDERSTAND. Even though I felt that I was touching something deep and fundamental, I felt underwhelmed.

Back to the meadow

I didn’t get any deep knowledge, didn’t get the ability to manipulate matter, or keep feeling the wires holding it together. 4 It wasn’t a level of abstraction that was possible in daily life. An old metaphor I used a couple of ago when discussing logic: you are a car made out of this constructon set. You exist and move only where the set allows you, since it’s an inherent limitation of the construction set you are made of. You can conceive only changes that are possible using your universe of screws and holes. Nothing else can exist. Then someone sprays some paint on you with a brush. You won’t see it and notice it, it is none of your concern and nothing you are able to understand. Or someone bends one of your pieces — going absolutely against the rules you thought holy and the only possible. Or are the king in a chess game, then someone takes you and hides you in his pocket, one turn before checkmate.

After I returned to the meadow, I didn’t see or feel any wireframes, and didn’t need them. But I felt empowered and able if not control, than to at least navigate the space around me. The meadow didn’t have any power anymore, I could walk, thought I remembered that the knives are there somewhere below. It has a heavenly meadow like it was supposed to be, and I felt happy, and could enjoy the meadow and its dark sky as I thought I should.

ISR as techique is pretty interesting. It heavily intersects with lucid dreaming and with all the bursts of creativity I get right before falling asleep. (When I think of things as I’m falling asleep, it’s always easy to see when I’ll lose touch with reality — it’s when my thoughts start getting really weird, and though I still feel the bed and my thoughts and can think critically, I know then that sleep is maybe 40 seconds away.)

When I was a child, I remember hearing songs before falling asleep and in my dreams, songs with actual nice background music and rhymes that were created in real time. I remember remembering the songs and rhymes in the morning, and they were actually quite nice. Also my dreams back them were very long and complex, with multiple story lines. It’s sad that I never wrote them down.

I still feel my subconscious is able to do amazing things, and is even better at creativity and divergent thinking than I am.

After QS, the next big area of things I want to explore would be learning to use my subconscious to generate ideas or solve problems. This sounds like something out of the New Age Bullshit Generator, but in my case, I was shown multiple times what my subconscious is capable of. If only I could remember it all as I did when I was a child.

If it was clear that the bird was male or female, I would still have used it. On a scale from 0=male to 100=female it was purple, as the quote about writers’ life goes.

3.

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Stolen from the Simpsons, “this would have been the perfect moment for it to start raining”, can’t find the episode.

4.

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It wasn’t a level of abstraction that was possible in daily life. An old metaphor I used a couple of ago when discussing logic: you are a car made out of this constructon set. You exist and move only where the set allows you, since it’s an inherent limitation of the construction set you are made of. You can conceive only changes that are possible using your universe of screws and holes. Nothing else can exist. Then someone sprays some paint on you with a brush. You won’t see it and notice it, it is none of your concern and nothing you are able to understand. Or someone bends one of your pieces — going absolutely against the rules you thought holy and the only possible. Or are the king in a chess game, then someone takes you and hides you in his pocket, one turn before checkmate.